Wikidata:Fifth Birthday

Wikidata went live five years ago, on 29 October 2012. This year, we're celebrating the birthday with 200 people during the first WikidataCon <3 Congratulations and best wishes for another great year! Stay as awesome as you are!

Community stories

Blog posts, essays and thoughts written by Wikidata editors.

Wishes for the year to come, by Tpt

The exciting lexicographical data project, new tools and toolkits, and efforts data quality: Tpt explains his hopes and wishes for the next year on Wikidata. Read more

Happy Birthday Wikidata! by the Gene Wiki Team

The Gene Wiki project added Wikidata-entities for all human genes. This project was completed by October 6 2014. Since then, they have continued enriching Wikidata with gene annotations from other species. Read their birthday wishes here

Some random thoughts on the occasion of Wikidata's fifth birthday, by PKM

We all like to worry, but on Wikidata's fifth birthday, PKM also finds a lot to look forward to in the next five years. Read more

Birthday wishes and a personal story, by Spinster

Quite some time ago, User:Spinster already hoped that something like Wikidata would once be invented. Now Wikidata has turned five, and she loves it :-) On this special occasion she also has thoughts and wishes for its future. Read her story here.

Happy Birthday, Wikidata by RolandUnger

Roland sends birthday wishes from Wikivoyage and takes a closer look at the opportunities and challenges of the two projects. Read his story here.

Today Wikidata is turning 5 years old. The past year has been a year of growth and expansion. We are giving more people more access to more knowledge every single day while getting to geek out on structured data ;-)

Let’s take a look at some of our achievements of the past year:

At this point about ⅓ of all edits in Wikimedia are happening on Wikidata. And even more importantly, the number of non-bot edits in Wikimedia projects is finally growing again - and almost all of it is happening on Wikidata.

The next year promises to be an exciting one. I am especially thrilled by: We are going to add lexicographical data, opening new doors and promising exciting new opportunities. We are going to continue to improve our data quality tools like constraints checks. And we are going to work on building out our ecosystem by getting more people to run their own Wikibase installation to publish data they care about.
But we also have to tackle a few challenges. As Wikidata is growing we have to adjust. We have to adjust processes, documentation and sometimes our thinking. That, I think, is our main challenge for the year ahead. We have more data, more editors and more users of our data than ever before. This brings with it increased expectations and responsibility. The users of our data, especially the large Wikipedias, have very high expectations toward Wikidata and I hope that with their help we can get closer to fulfilling them. And as we amass more data we also need to ask ourselves how we are going to maintain and work with it in the long run. The processes we set up when Wikidata was just beginning are not necessarily the best ones anymore.

With this I’d like to say Thank You for an amazing year and please stay awesome, open, lovely, enthusiastic and positive. We’re doing no less than changing the world together - every single day, with every single edit. Let’s celebrate!